Wednesday, May 30, 2012

On the video on viewmagazine.tv looking at the future of videojournalism, I show how videojournalism was around in 1994 and how prior that creative film making emerged from such discursive programmes as BBC reportage.

The video contains some rare footage from 1994 of the 30 videojournalists chosen from 3000 candidates and that the explicit meaning of videojournalism has usurped its more implicit capabilities.

The video is the public cut, from the write up from research looking at future storytelling which I'm writing up at present.

In essence as Susan Sontag said of photography, if you take a picture of drawfs, you get dwarfs. Yet Roland Barthes would also draw our attention to hidden meanings that existed in text and pictures, that subconsciously the reader.

The aim as I draw on this extensive research is too strengthen the global training programme that's been used in the UK for the Press Association; in the US, at the Chicago Sun-Times, China, Egypt...

Below are frames from the short film. You can see more on viewmagazine.tv giving an insight into a different notion of videojournalism.

Friday, May 25, 2012

How wondrous is this round thing I thought, as I pondered what I would say to a class of fifteen year olds about the media.

The humble ball fitted the answer.

We can trace this round thing, documented as football, back to the ancient Greeks, though its conceivable Neanderthals kicked around a round object.

But at some point the modern game emerged. It was rowdy, played by peasants and many attempts were made to ban it. Then on the posh plains of English public schools the apocryphal story emerges of a pupil picking up the ball and running with it.

Modern rugby was born, whilst in the US Princeton Uni students started playing a game called "ballown" and with a little influence from Rugby, American football made its presence felt.

Across the world in no particular order you had an assortment of ball games, Australian Rules; Handball with its rules set by the German Max Heiser and friends; Volleyball, and so on.

Now we haven't even got around to this round ball's smaller siblings and how they're played: cricket, Tennis, snooker, I could be here all day.

The point is certain rules defined the way we interacted with a ball. These may have been played by masses, but then they wanted acceptance universally - within something like the Olympics.

The media is this football and news one of the universal games. Everyone knows, or thinks they do, but just as Rugby or American Football was being devised, so fresh iterations from news are emerging.

Now news must not be confused with reality as this diagram below shows. If reality represents that out there that in consciousness we can experience, then news is a construct within that.

Another popular supposedly polar opposite construct is cinema. That too lives in reality yet unlike news is thought of being non-fiction.

What's happening in the world today is these definitions that fixed what we knew are being erroded or to be precise diffused. In effect society is evolving. We want a new game beyond football. In essence that's what Postmodernism and Jean Francois Lyotard's essay is about.

So Logos that in ancient Greek and academia stands for "to tell", or speak, such as in opinions in say blogs and personalised films is also finding itself overlapping amongst classical news to represent something news worthy that I will call something else...

Firstly, a slight detour. Now the classical news construct works like this. The reporter on the right has a story she needs to corroborate or to find. She speaks to the man on the right and writes some notes,

That thing that now combines what was once news and your logos is "capital". I quite likes this word for two reasons. I came across it being used as slang, and then from a period film used in the context of "good", "wicked", "cool".

But also that Capital as in social capital, monetary capital is something of value and things that have value are often rmemorable, news programmes are not!

So what does this all mean and what has it got to do with football?

That chiefly words by themselves are fixed, but society moves on and in so doing either moves a word on or revises it to something new. Not content with the game of football, all sorts of other games emerged, such as Rugby, but football still exists.

Similarly news will exist but the impact of digital and technology is questioning how we participate, handle or devise new ways for dealing with this classical construct.

But to devise a new something we need to be able to substantially defend it, and that's would take a while here, but that's what I do on viewmagazine.tv so why not take a peak on viewmagazine.tv

David Dunkley Gyimah has worked in news since 1987 and is a lecturer, artist and award winning content creator and videojournalist completing a doctorate around news.

Wednesday, May 23, 2012

Out with Nato forces in Norwegian seas, various teams are practising how to thwart one of the biggest threats to its forces - an asymmetric attack by a small craft, such as the one above.

An elite super force at the mercy of those who don't play by the rules, asymmetric is a term that also has a great deal of currency in post-media.

Simply put it's the one sided relationship between two bodies and its become a prominent issue in the world of social media.

Where once it was the elite media that controlled the conversation flow, and still do largely, social utilised the one tramway that was truly untaintedly social - the Internet.

Ninety years ago when engineers cracked radio transmission, that too could have gone social, but the capitalists in communications and advertising smelt big dollars; ham radio was the nearest thing to a symmetrical relationship.

But is social today in danger of losing its USP, and reverting to its sibling's capital traits?

There's no denying success stories that have traded on the technological-social use of social, and by that I mean how Face book, Twitter etc have altered communications patterns.

But now we're fast approaching asymmetric flows and what could be called privilege-redundancy. How so? Simple.

Firstly the very products that are being social, unlike Berners Lee's Net are capitalising on our increasing use of their products in an asymmetric way. That's fair though because, access to Facebook is free. Free that is in terms of monetary value, but not now the new currency which is privacy.

But a more prominent asymmetric relationship has emerged. A new tranche of mediacasters who so understand either how to market themselves or their stories that the relationship they establish is almost as disproportionate at traditional media.

There's some rationale to this. If you're the former technology editor of a large media company, then it's likely you have a rich vein of contacts and stories that will be equally alluring now as they were with your previous company.

Media companies with a well of stories will always have the advantage, but back to the individual. Competitive advantage means from what was an obscure, confusing piece of software in Facebook, now we all know it.

Facebook now possesses privilege-redundancy. The surprising thing is not that any company or individual isn't using social media, it is that saturation is nearing and strategists have no idea yet how to gain competitive advantage. The field isn't quite levelled, but..

So the oxymoron is that companies through some darwinian process are ensuring their asymmetric advantage, a number of individuals with strong content can ensure competitive advantage. Yet for many of us the tools that we all share will soon give us no advantage at all.

So what's next? Media theorists and philosophers, more used to trying to understand trends than singular entities might are useful studying. The Clay Shirkey's Here comes Everyone, Lev Manovich's Language of New Media, and Henry Jenkin's Convergence Culture all caught behaviour patterns at the right time.

And by looking at the variables

less privacy, more social interaction

more video literacy

Web 3.0

search for more competitive advantage

The internet will move on from Facebook -it's natural media Darwinism

And the one I have seen, where you can turn on your device to hear your name being mentioned in any part of your world is with investigating. More tomorrow and why it pays to be understand the methodology behind technological critiquing

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Four years ago in one of the highest buildings in London in Canary Wharf I was invited to a meeting of some of London's creatives.

There were about 50 of us seated in a circle and the idea, on the day, was to act as a giant think tank.

Chaired by Jude Kelly, Artistic Director of the Southbank Centre, I had a couple of ideas. The one that got Goldie agreeing was a Sims Olympic 2012. Now that would have been something.

But the one I really wanted to get off the ground was the Outernet and web based stories.

My research bringing together all the major outfits I had worked for, such as BBC Newsnight, Reportage, Channel 4 News and Soho Ad agency Re-active, identified a crack - a contemporary method in story form and presentation.

One of those focuses around Deleuze's Time image, where we come to love stories for how they play with time, though Deleuze's concept is much deeper than this.

I used this to make the short film Tahrir Memento showed at the Sheffield Doc Fest last year.

character wall

We love stories that involve characters and bring us into a film-mind world. In researching how they would work I created this giant map which exists on my study room wall and acts as my methodology - an approach to storyform

I have decided to go ahead with the project, tieng it in with my Artist in Residence position at The Southbank Centre.

I am calling it Re'P'lay 2012 - a play of words on relay - which features in the games.

A rather unorthodox approach, but the first trailer gives some idea of stories and from there I'll hope to pitch for sponsorship. So if you're a company, exec, individual interested in where art and journalism meet and tell stories that make us lose all sense of time, please drop me a line at david@viewmagazine.tv

Saturday, May 19, 2012

As with Videojournalism, the turn of 2000 would produce a new crop of digital creatives who were equally at home encoding as they were filming.

Flash couldn't support video, so you had to create the illusion of movement with bitmap images, and when it did you'd be hard pressed to have a control panel.

It's one reason why if you look through some of viewmagazine.tv my sites early work there's no player.

If video wasn't the in-thing before 2000 what was? Simply, text and images and the daddy of the story form was one Matt Owens, who launched his voluminous site called: Volume One.

Matt, from Austin Texas became the icon for many design/video companies, also popularising the Death March - working 16 hours a day.

What is it with Austin Texas, with the likes of Owen, Rodriguez, Slacker generation and SXSW?

Web-based storytelling is now a lucrative field and an integral part of the final project modules I supervise at the University of Westminster, from design, broadcast and agency experience over the last 14 years.

Interestingly, and perhaps somewhat disappointedly its workflow has inherited Television's division of labour, with the producer, researcher, writer and so on. I do away with that.

Yet also it's understandable, given web story form has become the primary job of the designer and encoder as one, and not videoists. That shouldn't have happened.

The television industry's insouciant attitude to all things digital online was the cause. When they sat down to regroup, it was to dust off a 30 year old idea of going HD.

The web would never compete with us now was the thinking, though that's a fallacy for anyone who knows Gilders law.

Web-basing grand stories
But to become a true tour de force, whilst web docs do well for online, the psychology of solo story telling in scale, quite literally, can be lacking.

That said, a number of web-based story forms have become indelible, such as the Filmmakers in Residence project, and Soul of Athens - both group projects.

Below are some outstanding pieces from previous Masters students.

First how do you approach web based story?

Online multimedia story form follows a similar logic to database storyform, redolent of computer programming. Though it's based on textual ( print) and video ( TV) codes, it's killer app is online's hyperlinking. So choice and arcs (emotional and narrative) can be inbuilt.

1. Determine what the story is. The more compelling the content, the more you'll be able to use emotional or conflicts arcs to create your jump off spot. Think page-turner of a good book
2. Map the story out, building in contingencies for uncertainties and attempt a linear narrative.
Invariably sub stories will find their way into the story. When that happens go back to point 1.
3. It's all with the front page - the window into your site. Get that right and it's a good start. There's singularly one place online which groups some of the best front pages, designed to sell you that one story. Apple Trailer site
4. There's a very common theme on the site. See if you can spot it. Philosopher Deleuze refers to it as the affective image.
5. Now comes the delineation of the story, which is where personal supervision comes in to determine how and what apps to use to create the maximum impact. In part it involves project management and a willingness from the student to push past their comfort zone.

She worked hard to get this to work, and when she thought it was all over feedback had her redouble her efforts.

The result is a cinematic grouping of photo-stories explaining London's dire air.

6. Stephy's Echoes of the Mountain examines the plight of a small village in China, which the author claims is indicative of many others.

Breadwinners leave the village to earn a living, leaving their children with elderly citizens.

This is a heart warming and wrenching story. The site's margins are out, since last reviewing it.

David Dunkley Gyimah creates and lectures in online video story forms. He publishes the award winning site viewmagazine.tv which includes projects such as Collisionsat the Southbank which covered a week of creative work between artists. And previewed multimedia forms at the Olympic 2012 pitch gathering. He's currently completing an web story around his four-year videojournalism programme in Cairo.

Channel 4's Jon Snow comments on David work as "original".

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A life-changing tutor and mentor - who ABSOLUTELY changed the world of video for my group of new VJs. His work is as inspiring as his teaching methods, and constantly challenging the best way to achieve results. His website and blog and compelling, must-follow sites for anyone working with video or multimedia on the web.

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